Rio Olympics: How a bunch of entrepreneurs are trying to improve India's abysmal record in sports

In an Olympic year, a bunch of entrepreneurs, some of them past champions themselves, are doing their bit to transform India into a nation of winners.

Ninety of the first 100 schools Saumil Majmudar approached to hawk a customised exercise and physical education programme showed him the door. The serial entrepreneur and founder of EduSports, a Bengaluru-based venture, has spent the last five to six years hardselling physical education (PE) programmes to schools, which have traditionally viewed physical fitness and sport as an also ran to academic excellence.

Changing times and slowly shifting attitudes to sport have helped; from being dismissed at sight, Majmudar's customised programmes have now shown growing acceptance — 4,000 schools across 100 cities, covering 3.5 lakh children are today part of EduSports' programmes.

He thinks a million children can be covered in three years, as acceptance of being physically fit and trained in sports only grows. However, in a country widely seen as a global sporting featherweight (India won six medals at the last Olympics in London, compared to 88 by China), ventures such as EduSports may be taking the first tentative steps in a much-needed and delayed transformation.

While India had some highs recently (cricket world champions in 2011, hockey Asian Games Gold and the successes of individual sportspersons in badminton, wrestling and boxing), Indians have generally got used to being alsorans in sport. Blighted by a culture that puts sports several rungs below academics, small (or no) budgets and administrators generally more involved in promoting themselves rather than the sportspersons they manage, success has eluded the nation.

Building a business in this sphere won't be easy. Gopal Jain, managing director of Gaja Capital, a mid-size private equity fund, believes there are several challenges ahead. "(The) key issue is scalability," he adds. "If you cater to only the best sportspersons in the country, you are limited to hundreds, maybe thousands, of athletes."

However, what is needed is a business model that engages millions of children, sports enthusiasts and their families with products and services that drive engagement on a daily or weekly basis.

Chirag Patel, chief executive of KOOH Sports, a provider of customised physical education programmes, agrees that the industry is yet in flux.

When KOOH sought to scale up its after-schools business, the top management discovered there were dozens of self-appointed sports coaches in India but few of them were hireable.

"All the coaches were self-proclaimed stars, but they couldn't string conversation (in English, Hindi or indeed any other language) for a minute when we interviewed them," Patel says. The cofounders, who previously ran BPO firm Intelenet before founding KOOH Sports, say they are using some lessons from their previous business. "Scaling and training are key in this business," says Patel. "I may be good at squash, but can I train a 10-year-old to play?"

What's more, since the industry is still at an early stage, there are very few entrepreneurs that have a holistic and deep sector expertise essential for this rapidly evolving market. Finally, the biggest hurdle might be one of mindsets, with academics taking priority over sports education of any sort.

"Most schools in India, especially at median fee points (Rs 12,000 to Rs 35,000 per year) don't have adequate staff to run a high-quality sports programme," he says. "PE classes are either treated as free periods or hijacked by science and math teachers scrambling to complete their syllabus on time," he adds. Increasing screen time (TV, mobile, PSP), commuting and lack of neighbourhood playgrounds exacerbate the problem.

Strong Resistance to Change

The slow growth of SportsMechanics, a company best known for its technology platform to help professional athletes, shows the challenges of trying to build a sports-based business in India. Over a decade ago in 2003, Subramaniam 'Ramky' Ramakrishnan shot to fame when he was enlisted as a technical analyst with India's national cricket team, using advanced technology to iron out flaws in players' games.

Over much of the past decade, he's tried to replicate the success outside the national team (six of eight IPL winners used his technology, for example), but has found the going more difficult in other sports. While his technology helped India's men hockey team make it to the Olympics, other initiatives with table tennis, athletics, boxing and weightlifting were discontinued after the last Olympics.

"The sporting community is slow to embrace new things," he admits. "There is a strong resistance to change." While some athletes such as long jumper Sahana Kumari have used SportsMechanics' technology to spot unseen technical defects (and in her case, qualify for London 2012), others have been slower to adapt. "You can't reach anywhere in global sport without embracing scientific methods...data-based decision making will make or mar a professional sportsperson's progress," says Ramakrishnan.

These challenges haven't stopped intrepid entrepreneurs from trying their luck with sports. Majmudar's EduSports, KOOH Sports and LeapStart are trying to build sporting culture from primary school itself. Others such as G Chandra Sekhar Reddy, Aashutosh Chaudhari and tennis pro Mahesh Bhupathi, the cofounders of Sports365.in, are attempting to fill the gap in sports gear. The looming explosion in sports has also attracted the likes of Reliance Industries (in a joint venture with sports management major IMG) and Bollywood star Abhishek Bachchan.

"Urban planning has failed us," reckons Majmudar of EduSports. "We barely have any playgrounds for our children...the model (to build a space for sports and recreation) is broken and they are reliant on school to provide a space for physical exercise." However, younger parents are today getting increasingly cognizant of the need for physical exercise and sports (often due to their own lifestyle ailments) and helping promote programmes in school.

For the Love of Sports

"We want to provide a much better physical education programme for children and have them fall in love with sports," adds Majmudar. While slow initial acceptance has been replaced by more breathless growth recently, just having children exert themselves isn't the only point of the programme. EduSports provides a 12-point measurement system for children to help the school and parents track progress individually. "We want to build sports as part of the education system, rather than as a vestigial piece of it," adds Majmudar. While many misconceive a PE programme with sporting laurels, most firms are first trying to imbibe sporting culture from a young age, rather than prematurely inculcate a winning habit.

In under four years, the founders of KOOH Sports have grown their business of providing PE programmes from nine schools to 150. "We had to build our business with education sector based norms...we had to have a curriculum-based approach, with assessments and where parents were engaged and the school's brand improves," says chief executive Patel. "There is appetite (for KOOH's programmes) from schools as long as you demonstrate value."

Over time, KOOH has pushed schools to replace their existing PE time with custom-based programmes and has increased the number of sports taught from two to 13. At the end of 2013, with 30 schools in its kitty, Patel realised that the company could do much more than just recast and replace PE programmes.

It also launched an afterschool sports initiative and later inter-school leagues (driven entirely by sponsor monies) to proselytise sports in India. Today, KOOH has some 320 coaches and plans to hire dozens more to keep pace with burgeoning demand. Now, Patel is plotting a slow global expansion for KOOH — the firm is considering moving into south, south-east and west Asian countries, even as it considers buying companies at home to expand.

Rather than jumping into learning a sport, ventures recasting PE programmes in schools are making more fundamental changes in their approach. "Early childhood isn't about teaching a sport, but more about facets such as spatial awareness and movement exploration," says Dhruv Nagarkatti, CEO of LeapStart, a provider of these customised programmes. "We start with throwing a balloon before we get to handling a ball."

It is only in class II that the rudiments of sport (catching, trapping a ball) are initiated, before actual sporting instruction begins. Different management consultants advised him not to pursue this avenue, but Nagarkatti persisted and claims to have built a profitable business, covering 1,80,000 students in 46 cities across 150 schools.

"It is now established that a robust PE programme boosts academic performance," he contends. "The basis of any sporting nation is being physically active." He points to a country such as Spain, which has some 1,700 tennis tournaments a year and is able to churn out a series of world beaters.

LeapStart has also made some inroads in India; it runs the largest school-level badminton programme (1,500 children) and one Gautam Mishra, an upcoming footballer, progressed through the ranks to be selected for a stint at the academy of Tottenham Hotspur, the English Premier League Club, played for Bengaluru Football Club and is now with the country's national team.

"We will build our own sports academy soon and plan to expand our schools programme to reach 500 institutions in the next three years, covering 5,00,000 students," he adds.

Others too believe things are looking up. The founders of Sports365 sense that the tide may be shifting.

"We think our business will double in the next 12 months," says cofounder Chaudhari. "India and Indians have become more amenable to playing and winning more sports beyond the usual obsession with cricket." Today Sports365 has some 35,000 products on its platform, across 50-odd disciplines, from some 200 brands. It also runs a thriving business supplying equipment to schools, academies and clubs and Chaudhari says it already works with some 200-plus such institutes nationwide.

Building on this growing appetite for sporting gear of all sizes, shapes and prices, Sports365 will soon expand to include private label sports apparel and accessories and specialty subportals for sports such as golf and athletics, besides managing the online presence of brands such as Wimbledon Towels, V22 and Callaway Golf. Its B2B enterprise is gaining ground too; it has codeveloped shoes with footwear giant Nike for school children, supplies gear such as tennis balls and badminton shuttles for academies and manages several sports teams too. "We have raised funding from two VCs (Powerhouse Ventures and Zolon Ventures) and expect to close our next round of $5 to $8 million in the next few weeks," Chaudhari adds.

Between 1980 in Moscow and 2012 in London, Indian athletes won barely a dozen medals and in 1984, 1998 and 1992 won none at all. Geet Sethi, the multiple-time world billiards champion, and Prakash Padukone, the first shuttler to win the All-England Championship, teamed up to form Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), an organisation focused on identifying and fine-tuning the skills of potential Olympic winners.

OGQ today has a budget of over Rs 12 crore and supports more than a dozen athletes in eight sports. It hopes its efforts bear fruit this year — Sethi believes India can double its medal haul from 2012. Private enterprise has been trying to fill the gap left by state stupor.

OGQ then wants to supplement state-run efforts in sports with its own band of coaches and technical staff across eight individual sports and use examples such as Abhinav Bindra, Saina Nehwal, Sushil Kumar and Mary Kom to discover India's next big medal hopes. "There is definite political will...lacking is professionalism in monitoring performance and nimbleness to make changes," Sethi adds.

Former Indian hockey captain Viren Rasquinha, who is now chief executive of OGQ, explains that the organisation uses a research team to scout events from junior to district level to hunt for talent.

While the youngest recruit is 12 (OGQ recently launched a junior programme), it focuses on closely monitoring their performance. "Their performance has to be both consistent and sustained and ever-improving to make this difficult grade," he adds.

While OGQ has a battery of specialists (trainers, physios, mental conditioners and so on) it also provides key equipment and logistical support to India's next sports stars.

"Equipment is costly and spares are a huge challenge," says Rasquinha. "A rifle for a 50-metre event costs around Rs 5 lakh, archery gear costs Rs 3 lakh or more...a rifle has around 100 different parts to worry about and archery similarly has 33." OGQ worries about these problems for its enlisted athletes, rather than them getting distracted with these issues.

Investors seem keen to back some of these business plans. For example, KOOH recently raised funding from TCS, HDFC Bank and Faering Capital; Gaja Capital has backed Sportz-Village, the parent company of EduSports; and Sports365.in is also in the market for fresh fund injection and its cofounder Chaudhari says there has been plenty of interest from investors.

"Sports and fitness is at the cusp of a highgrowth phase driven by a combination of cultural and market forces," reckons Jain of Gaja. "On one hand, there is a huge health scare among parents regarding child obesity and the overall fitness levels of children. On the other, India's medal tally in the top international sporting events has doubled in this decade (400 medals) compared to the preceding decade." Spurred by these shifts, parents are increasingly open to investing in their children's sporting talents and consider it as a serious hobby or alternative career choice.

These kinds of shifts have convinced newer entrants in the sector that they have a winning idea. In 2015, Ujwal Sutaria hit the headlines when he skipped placements at IIM-Ahmedabad and instead started his own venture Athletto, which aimed to plug this obvious gap. Evidently, there are 1,200 sporting facilities in the venture's home base of Bengaluru along with Gurgaon and thousands more untapped nationwide. Typically, accessing these facilities has been a lottery involving showing up at the venue and hoping there's a slot open. Sutaria wants to change the rules of the game.

The bootstrapped venture has made the smallest inroads into the market, with 200 units on its platform and some 2,000 regular users. "Most of these facilities are not on Google... we had to physically verify their existence (photos, coaches, history of the place) and bring them online," says Sutaria.

"There is a massive information asymmetry in the market that needs to be urgently addressed." As a former national-level tennis player, he's seen the inertia in India's sporting set up first hand and hopes his startup can be part of the changing attitudes on this front. "I can see a transformation happening and sports is going to be India's next sunrise sector," he adds.

Despite his concerns about decision-making, SportsMechanics' Ramakrishnan is optimistic of the future. "For the first time, sports has become an organised industry ...it is all set to explode, and after entertainment, sports could be the next big blockbuster in India." Besides SportsMechanics' focus on technology aids for professionals, it also has another business interests too.

For one, it was the company that fitted out cricket scorers nationwide with tablets and revolutionised that aspect of the game. Then, Ramakrishnan is trying to recast the broadcast of sport content to make fans and the audience decide where, when and how to consume content. SportsMechanics is the first company globally to integrate live scoring on Facebook and hopes this social media virality will help bring in many more fans (and customers) for the company. "We want to build a Rs 100-crore sports business," he adds.

Majmudar of EduSports, however, believes these companies have a long way to go. "We have covered barely a few thousand schools...there are around 75,000 private schools in India and 25,000 of those are our target market with annual fees ranging from Rs 10,000- Rs 4.5 lakh," he says. "The sports sector has just kicked off and it's going to be a long, tough game."

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WANTED: AN ADMINISTRATIVE OVERHAUL

When it comes to sport, Indians have traditionally made themselves comfortable at the bottom of the heap. The time may have come to change this losing habit. While private enterprise is trying to fill the breach left by state sloth, it may be time for sports administrators to stand up and be counted. Long derided for being inefficient (and often corrupt) India needs its administrators to now be proactive in transforming India into a sporting superpower. Multiple-time billiards world champ Geet Sethi thinks there are the earliest green shoots of efficient sporting administration out there, but stresses the need for them to work faster and better for India to take this sporting leap of faith. Starting in Rio this year, India's sports administrators should pay heed to this need for speed.